WELCOME

Bitter snow falling

Waiting the King’s arrival

Born in a cave

The afternoon was dark and chill with the promise of a bitterly cold late December evening to follow. The hail siling down upon the roof of my little house sounded for all the world like a stream of ball bearings thrown from a great height into a bucket. I let myself into the inky blackness of my unlit hall,  threw my briefcase onto the sofa in the living room and went into the kitchen. I had had a tiring and a tiresome day in the university and all I wanted now was my supper.

As I stood in the middle of the kitchen contemplating the meagre contents of my fridge, I was distracted by a small high-pitched cry from the back porch. “Open this door. Let me in please.” it ordered. With only the slightest hesitation I obeyed, and a tiny creature made apparently from half a foot of oiled ebony string rushed past me like some demented bat fish out of a marine hell. It hesitated for not one nano second, but  ran through the kitchen into the coal dark hall, plunged up the uncarpeted stairs, and disappeared.

I followed the trail of raindrops into my bedroom but no  alien being was to be seen. I stood very still and heard a faint rasping noise under my bed. Lifting the valance I found a black kitten sitting on its right hind leg, its left hind leg high in the air motionless behind its left ear, tiny pink tongue protruding, staring at me with eyes unwinking and huge in its tiny face.  “I am rather busy at the moment,” it seemed to say, “however a little supper in about twenty minutes would not go amiss.  Thank you.”

In my fridge there were two tomatoes, a sweet potato, an old oyster mushroom, a rather small steak and a pint of milk. I cooked it all and precisely twenty minutes later the kitten, now dry and immaculately coated, strolled into the kitchen. It ate half the steak finely chopped with a spoonful of sweet potato and delicately lapped two bowls of warmed milk, while I dined on what was left over. Having washed its paws and whiskers, it made its way back upstairs and took up residence again under my bed.

The next morning after our modest breakfast of milk and cereal, I turned it out into the garden, grabbed my unopened briefcase, shouted “Bye, Cat.” and scurried off to the Cathedral. I could almost feel the eyes of the furry sentinel now sitting atop my wall boring reproachfully into my rapidly disappearing back.

When I arrived home that evening, I was well prepared with cod fillet, Munchies, and a large frozen pizza in my reticule. Mewing quietly the kitten ran along beside me, darted ahead of me into the hall and ran straight into the kitchen. We dined; we sat beside the fire; the kitten replete with fresh cod slept. “You can sleep here tonight, small Cat,” I said, “but … ” The kitten opened one eye and stretched languorously. “ … tomorrow I must try and find out where you belong.” I was speaking to an empty space - the lodger had made a sudden dash for the stairs and my bedroom.

I  tried to find Cat’s owners, but no-one knew him or wanted him or cared at all about him. So I made him a bed in an old bicycle basket and left him in the warm while I went out to do the Christmas Eve shopping. By the time I returned the air was dry and cold and a pale sun was setting over the Cathedral towers behind the old city wall. I was greeted by the warmth of my living room fire and a small black torpedo who shot into my outstretched arms.

“Hello, small Cat.” I murmured. “You know, I can’t go on calling you Cat; it’s not respectful. Who then shall you be?” I paused. “I could call you Baruch, the blessed one. Would you like that?” The kitten stirred, climbed up onto my shoulder, rested its small face against mine, and with a tongue like the finest sandpaper gently licked my cheek. I switched on the radio and we sat in the old armchair while the familiar music of the carols and the words of the Nine Lessons floated around us.

“I have no Christmas present for you,” I confessed, “but I don’t expect  you will mind.” From the radio the voices of the fair choristers of King’s gradually rose to a poignant crescendo:

 

"What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.”

The kitten’s quiet purr suddenly exploded into the heavy rattle of a miniature Kango hammer. God was in his heaven, Baruch had been welcomed into his new home, and all was very right with our world.

AT THE TURNING OF THE YEAR

Heavy clouds shone darkly above the hillside,
as I stood disappointed beside an empty manger.
No great star hung motionless and brilliant in the sullen sky,
no angels sang, no wise men rode through the night, nothing stirred
but the wind that blew dust into my eyes.

A stream nearby chivying the lazy reeds
murmured  “Look within yourself and your heart’s eye
will find the shepherds and the angels,
the Magi and Mary’s baby in his star-lit cradle.”
“Go” whispered the breeze lingering in the icy grass,
“follow the unchanging way which leads every weary soul to that light.”

Suddenly, in the cold still night on that empty hillside silent
beneath its leaden canopy, there were shepherds
fallen to their knees beside their midnight fire.
The dazzled sky was full of angels, whose mighty Hallelujahs
shook the branches of the olive tree
and warmed the night with the radiance of their song.

A train of grunting camels swayed over the rim of the world,
carrying tall men from the East in robes of scarlet and purple and gold,
dignified silhouettes against the coming of a new golden dawn.
Out of the shadows, from over the hills, across the rivers, down the valleys,
surged a thousand generations of pilgrims
come to honour the child, eternal paradigm of faith and hope and love.

A wide-eyed shepherd boy, his young lamb held close, walked beside me
along that crowded joyful road to Bethlehem, to witness
and to celebrate the old year’s dying, the new year’s resurrection 
and the promise made before the world began.
Which is now again to be fulfilled.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Esther

 Patience is the companion of wisdom

                                                                                    St Augustine

Esther, her purring kitten Tighearnan on her shoulder, sat on a small rise overlooking Wexford Harbour and and waited patiently for her Papa to come home. But Papa’s bones, picked clean by small fishes, lay deep in the ocean four thousand miles away. Eight months later with a bitterly complaining kitten in a small rush basket, Esther, Mina and Mama waited in the autumn cold of a Dublin evening for the steamer which would take them across the wild waved Irish Sea to a new life in Liverpool.

The was no more money in Liverpool than there was a welcome for a nearly destitute family. Both the sisters had to go out to work, Mina aged 13 to look after a rich merchant’s backward daughter, and Esther aged 10 to mind the alcoholic wife of an absent sea captain. Fifteen years later, Mina was travelling the world keeping a succession of backward daughters safely away from the disdain and condescension of upper class Liverpool society while Esther, at last, was engaged to be married.

Charles was the youngest son of a wealthy business man; Esther although poor was the daughter of an officer and a gentleman, and the niece of two generals. As such, she was made grudgingly welcome by her new family and her three children were born at the big family house in the rue des Ormeaux where Grandmama held court. Although she did not care much for her husband’s relations, her highly critical and ironic wit was mercifully well moderated by a great natural courtesy, and Esther was content.

Esther loved her children with a love as fierce as it was undemonstrative and her patience was severely tested by the war in France. Towards the end of 1917 Frederick, her regular army  son, returned home an invalid. Over the fields of Arras where the land was made blackly sticky with allied blood, her youngest son Bryan flew during the dreadful Spring of 1917, and then lay impatiently in an English hospital waiting for his eyes to heal and his sight to return. He rejoined his squadron, but Frederick died. Esther mourned silently for one and quietly rejoiced for the other, accepting whatever in his wisdom the Good Lord chose to throw at her.

Charles, who played the international stock markets, died in 1930 most of his money lost to the Wall Street Crash. Sixty years after Papa’s death in the Red Sea, Esther yet again found herself almost penniless. Encroaching arthritis gradually crippled her, the sheer weight of her years began to destroy her body until at last in 1950 she was taken into a geriatric ward. There with flashes of bright humour and great patience she waited three years for death to come gently for her.

In worldly terms Esther was a totally undistinguished woman; she was not beautiful, she was not famous, she had no brilliant  accomplishments.  The World failed to notice her brisk kindness, her undemandingly respectful friendship with children, her unquestioning acceptance of the madman, the vicious stray cat and the slings and arrows of an outrageous Fortune. She inspired great love in those around her and a wonderful sense of security and self worth. This was her distinction and her wisdom was indeed more precious than rubies.

Naomi                                             Illustration by Liz

THE INVITATION
 

Across the green of the sea kissed downs, flies my bird,
Cushioned on winds first warmed by desert sun
Where camel and Beduin for ever walk
Into a shimmering horizon, mysterious and bright.
Up and up he rises, my bird, a speck of dark light
In a sky of cerulean blue, a day star in the stillness
Of a summer afternoon. He hovers now, my bird,
Oh so gently, like an idle leaf in the soft June air.
Then, tumbling from the sky, stalling and whirling,
An acrobat exuberant, my bird beckons,
A pinioned king wonderful in his dignity and power.
And I can only marvel at this Malachi pointing me to heaven.

Naomi

My friend Joan's prayer:

Praise be to the great Weaver of Words and Wonder; for the threads of inspiration and hope, lovingly woven in the weft and warp of our lives.
 

THUNDERSTORM   by Oliver Postgate

Over the hill M’Bongo is beating his drum …

    Heavily the sweltering days have dragged,
    The sun burning in a brazen sky fills the air with a lake of shimmering heat.
    Pigs, heaped in the shade lie panting,
    The green corn is edged with brown,
    The heat-drugged brain fumbles with drowsy thoughts
    Lulled by the incessant murmuring of the flies, the weary earth has fallen asleep.

M’Bongo ...
    The thunder-god is laughing,
    Dark-winged and swift he mounts the sky.
M’Bongo ...
    The earth grows dark,
    His cold breath sweeps across the land,
    Shaking the leaves of the dusty trees till they dance with a lunatic joy.
    The mad cadence of his capering laughter,
    The cool swirl of the new wind,
    Fill my leaden bones with life.
The rain comes …
    Heavy drops beat out the measure of the dance of the wind,
    Faster, faster,
    Until the earth is blinded with the hiss of the happy rain
    Till the road is a river, the path a torrent,
    Till the wild joy of relief cries from the thirsty ground,
    And M’Bongo the mad one, giver of life, is dancing overhead
    Cracking the roofbeams of the world,
    Scoring with shards of light the grey mat of the rain.

The rain passes.
    The clear new air is filled with the smell of moisture,
    A white gull, wheeling against the shifting clouds
    Mingles its wailing with the last slow shaking of the thunder.
    A shred of pale light, peering over the sea’s rim
    Turns the roads and the roofs to silver.
    Under the dripping eaves a blackbird has begun to sing.

OLIVER POSTGATE
May 1944 

  

AFTER THE STORM

 "Love comforteth like sunshine after rain."

Shakespeare

There was a pestilence amongst the birds, their throats so swollen they could neither swallow nor sing. Within hours the sparrows and the pied wagtails toppled from their nests or fell starving from the sky. Then the waders, the fulmars and the big herring gulls, too exhausted by hunger to fish or fly, lay inert on the sand and amongst the rocks, their useless wings hanging like November leaves drooping from fog chilled trees.
 
The pigeon feeders brought them bags of seed and corn, but there were few birds of any kind still able to eat. Young people in white coats and thick gloves gathered up sick birds, put them gently into wicker baskets and took them away.  Unlike the gulls newly cleaned from spilled diesel oil who had come back to the beach at the beginning of Spring shining-feathered and plump with good food, none of the plague stricken birds were returned.

Many of the winter migrants, frightened by the great sickness and cursing their Goddess Rhianonn for punishing them for sins unknown, flew back early to their summer homes, risking the bitter hazards of that unseasonable journey and breeding grounds not yet fit to sustain them. Many of the gulls, convinced that the spreading of the plague was the work of humans, wrecked their gardens and attacked their children. In retaliation humans came with guns and shot every seagull they could find - it had been a massacre. The pigeon feeders wept, and the few gull survivors screamed their protest against the wind, and then they too left the shore.

 
The air was menacing, unnaturally warm as the copper sun sank into the early Spring sea, and the Turnstone was afraid. In her carapace of rich brown, with neat black collar and white shirt, she was an elegant bird, quick and sure in her scavenging, flicking over debris and stones with her short powerful beak, unworried by chivying pigeons and disgruntled herring gulls. This evening, as every evening, she flew up far above the beach to the concrete bridge across the steep-pathed Gap and settled down on a high ledge where the remnant of her flock roosted well away from the unwelcome attentions of small boys and other predators. But she did not sleep.

When dawn came, chill and grey, the exhausted Turnstone thought that this day might be her last. Looking down from her high perch she saw a procession of humans  led by a tall, lean old man in a shabby brown cloak who looked up at the roost and smiled at the bedraggled flock. “Fly down my brothers and my sisters,” he called, “we come with wholesome food and a powerful medicine to protect you.” One by one they fluttered down on to the outstretched hands. Very gently the old man inserted a tiny dropper into the Turnstone’s beak.  “There, little one,” he whispered, “very soon you will fly strong again; you will build a new nest and rear your fledglings. The beach will ring with the crying of gulls and the staccato autumn song of your returning flock.” He laid his wrinkled cheek against her neat head. “Have faith and hope, my sister; the storm is past; love is come again.”

Picture by Liz                                                                             Naomi